Saturday, Sept. 7: At a certain point, you begin to suspect she has a double – even a fleet of Lara Hopes and Ark-Tones that she sends out simultaneously along various national circuits, coordinated to ensure that the plausibility of it being one band is never completely challenged.
Sunday, Sept. 8: Ponckhockie Union’s Benedict Arnold “Ben” Rose is a struggling filmmaker who is in the early stages of producing a Howard Zinn-inspired documentary about the Burning of Kingston.
Sunday, Sept. 1: Upstate Reggae is equally about the preservation of the reggae tradition and the curation of the up-and-coming. Now that the Bearsville Theater is ominously dark, Upstate Reggae has taken to the water. This sunset cruise features music by Vybz Eurostar Lord and DJ Kevin, as well as Jamaican food.
Saturday, Aug. 31: The Texas-bred Pentatonix have sold nearly 10 million albums worldwide, in an age when 100,000 is a lot, and boast new media stats on the order of 15.5 million YouTube subscribers and views in the literal billions. And they are really good, too!
Saturday, Aug. 31: Rapturous, borderline-messianic praise for hip-hop auteur Flying Lotus flows as freely as it once did for his great-aunt and -uncle, Alice and John Coltrane, and for many of the same reasons.
Sunday, September 1: The New Yorker declared Trio Solisti “the most exciting piano trio in America,” and this writer regards their 2005 recording of Brahms’ three trios to be among the most sensitive he has heard, thanks largely to pianist Fabio Bidini’s grace under pressure (Brahms is murder on pianists).
Saturday, Sept. 7: Even by the Falcon’s lofty standards, this is a big one: The region’s premiere jazz-and-more venue presents MoodSwing Reunion, saxophonist Joshua Redman revisiting his landmark 1994 album with the quartet who made it, all of whom – to a man – a have gone on to become legitimate jazz superstars and generation-defining musicians and composers: drummer Brian Blade, bassist Christian McBride and pianist Brad Mehldau.
Friday-Sunday, Aug. 23-25: Set at the Ashokan Center – a venerable leader in environmentalist education, folk music curation and the preservation of a variety of traditional arts – the Hoot effortlessly combines live music with traditional dances, juggling workshops, crafts, film, locally sourced consumables and some serious talks about pressing issues and solutions. Why, it’s as if they have been doing it for years or something.
Starting at 5:07 p.m. on Friday, August 16 with Richie Havens and ending Monday morning with Jimi Hendrix, Radio Woodstock will play a near-complete reconstruction of Woodstock, with every performance from the festival included in chronological order.
Across its eight devilishly musical and imaginative compositions, Hum to Your Heart’s basal setting is one woman: her syrupy, melismatic vocals and her fingerpicked, throaty acoustic guitar. But only 40 seconds into “Bringing Myself Back Home,” Hum to your Heart announces its one grand permission, its loophole: lush, reverb swamped choirs of Ellas, sometimes deployed in deep and rich block chords, other times in savvy counterpoint.